


grow, tiny seed (you are called to the trees)

by LesbianLucretia



Series: tiny stars au [1]
Category: Gravity Falls, Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics), Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: (briefly) - Freeform, Anxiety, Autistic Greg Universe, Bisexual Greg Universe, Character Study, Greg SU and Greg OTGW are the same person au, Greg Theory, Homophobia, Metaphors and Allegories, Nonlinear Narrative, Other, Pines Dad Wirt, Trauma, Turtles, character backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:20:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22251745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LesbianLucretia/pseuds/LesbianLucretia
Summary: Greg was not a fearful man, at first glance.
Relationships: Greg Universe & Steven Universe, Gregory & Wirt (Over the Garden Wall), Marty/Greg Universe (Briefly), Rose Quartz/Greg Universe
Series: tiny stars au [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1601860
Comments: 5
Kudos: 140





	grow, tiny seed (you are called to the trees)

**Author's Note:**

> yes i know i didnt touch on marty being a dickhead and kind of abusive but i couldnt rlly find room
> 
> im excited abt this bcus it ties in with so many of my other fics too  
> i think i might be creating my own cinematic universe for my GF/OTGW/SU/TWDG fics

“Dad! Dad!” Steven calls out, making Greg turn away from hosing down his van. His son is running full sprint at him, his hands outstretched and cupped together. His parental instincts cry out in fear but he sees the excitement in his eyes and relaxes.

“What’s up, Schtu-ball?” He asks, curious what has him so excited. He stops right in front of him, careful not to smash into him.

“Look!” Steven practically yells, holding his hands out. “Look what I found!”

Greg leans over and peers into his cupped hands and sees--

  
  


Greg Universe, at first glance, does not seem like a fearful man. 

His childhood was happy, and although his teenage years full of angst and whirlwind romances and kissing boys and girls and figuring out himself, his twenties were spent in the arms of the love of his life. His life story does not seem to be the type to develop intense and sometimes debilitating anxiety.

One could theorize it developed when he had his son and realized how much danger was in the world. That it developed when his son’s guardians took him on deadly missions across the world where he could not follow. That it developed when he crashed his van and broke his leg to save his son and his son’s best friend from drowning by magic lady. 

These would all be wrong, in the end.

Greg Universe’s, DeMayo at the time, anxiety developed when he almost drowned in a small lake on Halloween.

He remembers everything in clear, vicious detail. He remembers the bee, the graveyard, the train. He remembers frogs and teapots and rolling down and down until ice cold water shocked his body and his tiny lungs began to fill and fill.

More than that, though. He remembers an autumn forest, a bluebird, and white glowing eyes encased in shadow. He remembered black turtles and a steamboat and a lantern that seemed to whisper, though he could not make out what it was saying to him.

He doesn’t remember how he got out. He remembers his older brother swinging an axe down at him, he remembers cold, and he remembers waking up in a hospital and seeing all of his brother’s friends stood around him.

Greg remembers shaking his new frog friend, hearing the tinkle of a bell, and seeing an almost glow from within his frog’s stomach.

He was only 7 years old, then. 7 years old and dressed in an elephant costume and bearing witness to things he did not yet understand. What he did understand, his optimism had turned it into something fun and okay and nice.

It took him years of denying anything too terrible had happened. Wirt, his brother, had never tried to get him to understand the gravity of what happened. They both talked of the Unknown, and they both understood it was real even if their parents never believed him when he told them. 

He was 15 when he actually, truly thought about it. 

Laying back in his room, listening to a rock tape, pulling at the hair that his mother had already begun to complain about the length of. He looked up at the ceiling and thought about the fact that he had almost died, there. 

He had almost died, there, in the Unknown. He had almost been turned into a tree-- he couldn’t remember the name, Applewood?-- and the Beast… the Beast had almost convinced Wirt to take on the lantern.

Greg felt something shift deep inside him, as if he’d had a monumental realization, and he scrambled to go call Wirt. He’d gone down into the kitchen and punched in his brother’s number in the wall phone and waited so patiently.

“Hello, Wirt Pines.” He’d greeted, and Greg’s throat closed up as he tried to speak. “Hello? Who’s there?”

“Wirt,” Greg managed. “I-- We-- I almost died, Wirt.”

“What?!” His brother yelped. “Greg, what happened? Are you okay?!”

“In the Unknown,” He clarified before his brother can book a plane ticket to come home. “I almost died. We… we both did.”

There’s an odd silence. Greg leaned his forehead against the cool fridge door.

“Well, yeah.” His brother said plainly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Greg, you can’t seriously be telling me that you just realized that.” His voice had an amused lilt to it, as if this earth-shattering thing is so _funny_.

Greg didn’t answer. He grit his teeth and gently hung up the phone. He made his way upstairs, ignoring his mother calling to him from the living room and ignoring the way he felt so, so heavy.

Greg had almost died, he’d almost died at 7 years old in a freezing pond and in the Beast’s clutches and his brother… his brother could be insensitive, he knows this first hand. He knows this from the first 7 years of his life where his brother had cast scornful looks at him and ignored him and bullied him. But this-- his brother should’ve been--

Greg felt like his life is falling apart around him from this single realization and his brother had just laughed at him for it.

(He’s used to being laughed at and mocked and scorned at school, when people realize he sits at the special table at lunch and flaps his hands and goes to the counselor once a week. He’s used to it but his brother had never judged that part of him, not once, but now he’s burning in anger and shame and hurt because his own brother had refused to take him seriously just like everyone else when they--)

It’s this that jumpstarts his rebellion from the family. He’d been trying to make peace with the fact that his parents don’t respect him because of a stupide diagnosis. He’d been introduced to the rock scene at 13, when his Dad’s cousin that was only a couple years older than him had insulted the genre and he’d been desperate to get his hands on anything that his cousin hated to keep him away.

Greg scrounged up some loose change, bought himself an electric guitar, and left home at 19 years old in a shitty old van. His leaving wasn’t planned, but the neighbors had seen him kiss his boyfriend Marty goodnight and-- well, one thing led to another, he supposes. 

(He didn’t call it being kicked out because in the end he’d been preparing for the day where he couldn’t tolerate them anymore. He’d pre-packed his bags ages ago.)

(Wirt never cared enough to try to check on him. Greg’s not even sure if his parents told Wirt immediately or they just pretended he didn’t exist.)

And again, if you saw this all from an outsider perspective, you would not say he was anxious. But Greg was smart-- _is_ smart. He saw the way anxiety had controlled his brother, he saw how fear controlled his parents, and he elected to… not do that.

His parents were not bad parents, per say. They had done more than basic necessities. They had loved him and been loved in return, for a short time. They had given him life. But they also seemed to think he was an extension of them rather than his own person.

His mother had been traumatized, at a young age. He knows this because she took it upon herself to dump her baggage onto him. He knows this because she would get wine drunk and cry on him as he attempted to take her to the couch while his father was out late. 

She would cry and talk all about how she’d been assaulted at 13 years old and how she’d been abused by her older sister and how she’d seen her first husband, Wirt’s dad, come home from Vietnam with dead eyes and a metal knee and just became so distant and she had been helpless to do anything about it and was such a coward for abandoning him like that.

He heard her spill all her trauma onto him because his Dad wouldn’t listen and Wirt was miles away, living and working in San Francisco and refusing to stay in Minnesota for longer than he had to.

His father didn’t do the same. His dad had been raised by a single mother and a tri-folded flag on the fireplace next to an urn. His dad was not the type to share emotions even if he seemed so soft and happy normally. His dad would see Greg crying and tell him to buck, and even if he didn’t mean it in a cruel way it certainly did not make Greg feel closer to his father.

His parents had micromanaged him and babied him until he started highschool, and then it was just him on his own.

He had panic attacks ever since he started highschool. He had hyperventilating and pulling at his hair and crying and shaking. He didn’t bottle it up or ignore it, he didn’t just fake it. He found his triggers and he found ways to deal. 

Music was his big way of dealing. He played and played for hours. Greg loved music more than he loved himself, which is to say a lot. He hummed and tapped and made up little ditties ever since he was small. His father was a music teacher so of course he’d grown up on music but it wasn’t until he found rock did he really love it.

He coped through music. He coped through loud basement shows that drowned out his thoughts and he coped through bruising his fingers on the strings and he coped through blasting music from his cassette player.

(There was a time in his life where he was sure his parents hated him. When he and Marty had broken up, remained friends, and began to travel together as a manager and a one man band. He would lay in the back, stare at the lampposts passing by, and think about if he died, that they would never know and never question it.) 

(Life went on and he was sure they were using his old bedroom as an in-home office, now.)

And then, a scarce 3 years after he’d left to see the world, he decided to settle down. A small, quiet town. Barely 50 people living there. Kept there by one single woman. Rose Quartz.

When he met Rose, he knew she was magical. He wasn’t afraid or upset because he’s seen magic before. He was just curious and so, so enamored by this giant woman and her gang of what he thought were kids at first but was more like… a found family.

(He had never said this outloud to anyone, but when he first really saw how much Rose and the gems had cared for each other at 21 years old… he felt raw, guttural envy. He wasn’t mad, no, he was so… sad.)

(There was a point in his life where Greg was sure he and Wirt would never leave each other’s sides.)

And Greg was an anxious man. He was anxious to play in front of crowds every time, he was anxious to kiss boys, he was anxious to love and he was anxious to let go. He was anxious to have people be too close and he was anxious to accidentally push them away. He was anxious to have a son and he was anxious to lose the love of his life. 

Greg was anxious to see his son hurt by people he didn’t even know, by people who hated him for his past, for who he was and who he could be.

But he tries his _fucking_ hardest to push past it, to enjoy life without dread hanging over him and to live and live and live and live without having to break apart at the seams every single time he saw something, heard something, or felt something that reminded him a little too much of snow on a forest floor and a dark pond below some train tracks and a deep voice and eyes of multicolored rings.

And right now Greg Universe was anxious to peer over into his son’s cupped hands, his fingers chubby and his smile wide, and find him holding a single, black turtle.

He inhales sharply and his mind begins to race.

Greg never aced his english tests. He didn’t know why the author made the curtains blue, he didn’t know what the themes of Frankenstein were besides being a cool book about a monster guy. He never understood allegories or metaphors or anything.

Wirt had. Wirt wrote poems and adored classic literature so much he went to school just to study more of it. Wirt became an author and an editor. Wirt could go on for hours about the connections of themes in _Of Pride and Prejudice_ , or sometimes just the romance.

(His brother was just as much of a hopeless romantic as him.)

Wirt was the one who wrote nonstop when they were out of the hospital and he was the one who would talk at Greg about the Unknown and try to make sense of what had happened while Greg absorbed this information and continued to play Monopoly with Jason Funderburker. 

“The turtles-- what did the turtles mean?” He chewed on his pen while sitting in his desk chair, and Greg simply looked up at him and smiled. 

“Maybe the turtles meant to help us!” He had said, and Wirt had looked at him with wide eyes. “I’ve never heard of an evil turtle. Have you, Wirt?”

And… he doesn’t remember what Wirt said.

But he sees the black turtle, wiggling in Steven’s hands.

“Where-- where’d you find that?” Greg asks him, trying desperately to ignore his fear building up in his throat. “We don’t get turtles around here.”

“I found it on a mission with the Gems!” He says, and pulls the turtle close his chest, cradling it gently. “Well, I found a whole buncha them and Pearl said to leave them alone but this little guy must’ve clung onto my shirt!” He laughs.

“Oh yeah?” Greg closer at it. It moves it’s head up to look at him and Greg fights back a shudder while looking it in the eyes. “Hm…”

“Dad?” Steven sounds quiet, now. “Is there something wrong? Is it-- is it bad?”

Greg looks up into Steven’s eyes. 

He has a choice, here. 

He can influence his own fears into his son, manipulate his own feelings into his own. He can scare his son away from this stuff because of his own history with it, despite how Steven might feel. Despite what Steven might experience. Despite what Steven may become.

Or he can encourage his curiosity and his love for all animals. He can encourage Steven to choose his own path and to be braver than he was. He can ignore his anxiety and he can refuse to raise Steven the same way his parents raised him. He can break the cycle.

“Not at all.” Greg smiles. “In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an evil turtle before.”

Gregory Universe, formerly DeMayo, isn’t a fearful man at first glance because he’s worked so, so hard to make it so.


End file.
